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| From https://kalafudra.files. wordpress.com/2011/02/korkarlen.jpg |
Director: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström
Cast: Victor Sjöström (as David
Holm); Hilda Borgström (as Anna Holm); Tore Svennberg (as Georges); Astrid Holm
(as Edit); Concordia Selander (as Edit's Mother)
Synopsis: On New Year's Eve, the
callous alcoholic David Holm (Sjöström)
is the last person to die before the new year arrives. This means, in folklore,
he will be forced to become the figure who drives the phantom carriage for the
next year, the one who picks up the souls of the immediately passed. He argues
with the previous driver Georges (Svennberg)
for his life, forced to relive his sins including his cruelty to the Salvation
Army nurse Sister Edit (Holm), who is
dying of consumption at the same time and has been calling for him in hopes of
redeeming him before she passes on in her death bed.
Horror as a genre shouldn't just
be about repulsion or nihilistic content. That is just one side of the coin of
a genre that can depict multiple emotions. It's possible to have very
optimistic and life affirming narratives which use the worst fears human beings
have as part of the message of perseverance. Fear of death and decay, which are
a basic tenant of horror, can led to hope despite them. Charles Dickens' A Christmas
Carol (1843) is as much a horror story as it is a Christmas tale, the
horror in Ebenezer Scrooge's potential end, dying alone through his own cruelty,
and in the ghosts that warn him of his misdeeds. The Phantom Carriage wouldn't have been in the horror genre if it
didn't have its supernatural backbone for the narrative, more of a drama with
faith based leanings and a clear alcohol abstinence message, but having the
pretext of death and a grim reaper figure weighing down on the protagonist David
Holm's shoulders does add an eerie meaning to the message, placing on that when
one died you would be judged for all your sins and doomed by them. This could
seem silly if one was agnostic or an atheist but it works as much as a
metaphorical concept, doomed in death to trawl behind one regrets of one's
failed life.
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Like A Christmas Carol, while it may come off as antiquated now, the
importance of one's acts in life are given repercussions as the afterlife is
made a symbol of failure in improving oneself. Unlike many a sanctimonious
movie, dire in their smiling messages of improvement, there is no peddling of
any individual being better than those who need to redeem themselves. Baring the
devil alcohol, what starts Holm's downward spiral in misanthropy is actually a
combination of bad luck fed by the complications of human interaction,
culminating in a proto-axe moment before The
Shining (1980) was even a novel originally. I see why Ingmar Bergman saw this as one of his favourite movies because
while the morality is black and white, the characters are complicated for
silent movie protagonists regardless of this. In particular in Holm's wife Anna,
pushed to a desperate way of escape to escape from him and his abuse, no one is
inherently a stock figure but all individuals hurt or healed by each other,
something which directly feeds into Bergman's
own films, including the likes of Wild
Strawberries (1957) where he cast Sjöström
and partakes in the same ideas of reflecting back on one's life at the precipice
of death even if in an entirely different context.
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| From http://ucl.booktype.pro/cinema/sensuality-and-gesture -in-sjostroms-korkarlen-d-fredriksson/static/Fredrikson1.jpg |
The supernatural context not only
adds an all-seeing eye overlooking the human species trying to exist, but it
solidifies the drama too. Anyone, even a good person, can end up in this world
having to drive the Grim Reaper's titular carriage, trudging through the
afterlife for a year that will feel like an eternity, the previous driver a
weathered old man who feared this fate in one of the many flashbacks that makes
up a flashback heavy plot structure. This aspect returns the story as well back
to the complexity of myths rather than the over-simplification of many other
movies, willing to see contradictions in the unseen forces and their elusiveness.
It also adds to the film as entertainment, a horror film where it's a
character's soul and not their lives that's at risk, not about an evil threat
from the outside to fear but one man being a violent drunkard being forced to
crawl through his own mistakes and to lay by the bed of a dying woman he
treated badly without being able to say to her how sorry he is.
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| From https://melluloid.files.wordpress.com/2013/ 04/screen-shot-2013-03-28-at-5-52-14-pm.png |
Technical Detail:
What immediately stands out,
though it is only a quarter of the film, is the still-to-this-day impressive
superimposition techniques used to depict the phantom carriage and the denizens
of the afterlife. The hard work that would've taken place, using the technology
of that day, is seen but my appreciation is beyond the mere recognition of what
was not available and what the creators did to overcome this. Instead my
appreciation is that it is entirely done with real props and merely with what
could be done in-camera rather than in ones-and-twos of a computer. The ghostly
figures have a greater sense of the ethereal than a modern day counterpart
created with CGI. The images of the carriage are evocative when they take
centre stage, especially in a scene of retrieval of a drowning victim from the
bottom of the sea, a haunting nature that benefits the film in its execution by
adding immense importance to the moral play of David Holm's redemption. As well,
they make powerful images for the horror genre even if they are a mere fragment
of the whole picture.
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The film's existence as a silent
film is of importance too. Silence films have become a unique part of cinema's
history, still maligned in some contexts - in how they're rarely played on
television, how not a lot are available outside the US on physical media - but with their aesthetics having an aura
around them that has led directors like Guy
Maddin to directly replicate their visual structures in their own work. What
could be seen as primitive in context of modern films - no sound, colour added
in post-production tints - betrays the innovations in their style that are more
advanced than some modern films, the aesthetic differences also providing The Phantom Carriage and other such
older films different moods in comparison. The smaller screen frame makes the
drama more closed in, and the tinting of scenes (orange for lit interiors, blue
for night time exteriors) gives the world depicted an unreality of its own. The
blackness of the environments, in small rooms, in a sparsely decorated
Samaritan ward, or the tombstones of a graveyard, adds an ink-like visual
atmosphere which emphasises the dread of the carriage but also the emotions of
the figures within the tale.
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| From http://www.thenativeangeleno.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/PC03.jpeg |
Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique
Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None): None
Barring the eeriness of the
"ghost" effects, this is a straightforward drama with little that
doesn't make sense directly in its meaning. Nothing is oblique and henceforth
not abstract.
Personal Opinion:
It was a long time since first
seeing images of The Phantom Carriage,
amazed by the visuals in a DVD release trailer, but it's a wonderful sensation
to have seen it now and for the film to stand up in reputation. Unexpectedly,
like the end of A Christmas Carol, I
ended up seeing a sweet film which left me with a warm heart rather than chills
down the spine, a sensation special for me as much as the fear one finds in
other horror films.
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